Tending Our Own Creative Fires
with practices that hold us up and hold us together
Over the past couple of months my creative flames burned low and it was as if my words and ideas had been hidden somewhere or lost. Really, though, it was a fried mind full of one bad news headline after another. I’ve felt the rage, confusion, grief, and overwhelm that many of us feel with a madman in charge and the titans of tech “biting chunks out of the world” as poet Gideon Heugh of The Green Chapel wrote in his post yesterday morning.
I would go to bed early, read a novel or watch a rerun of a feel-good show hoping that I’d wake up feeling better, recharged. That I’d have more joy and less despair so I could share some bit of encouragement or inspiration or delight. All through Lent and even through Easter week I couldn’t summon what I needed to write.
Nothing changed until this week. I realized that I’d let go of a small practice that didn’t seem important although it clearly was for me. Something that acted like a bellows that brought my creative embers back into flame after only two days. I couldn’t believe it was so simple. What was this practice, you ask?
